The inner Being, the Being of Action--the word he used to designate an
unknown specialization--the mysterious nexus of fibrils to which we owe
the inadequately investigated powers of thought and will--in short, the
nameless entity which sees, acts, foresees the end, and accomplishes
everything before expressing itself in any physical phenomenon--must,
in conformity with its nature, be free from the physical conditions by
which the external Being of Reaction, the visible man, is fettered in
its manifestation. From this followed a multitude of logical explanation
as to those results of our twofold nature which appear the strangest,
and a rectification of various systems in which truth and falsehood are
mingled.
Certain men, having had a glimpse of some phenomena of the natural
working of the Being of Action, were, like Swedenborg, carried away
above this world by their ardent soul, thirsting for poetry, and filled
with the Divine Spirit. Thus, in their ignorance of the causes and their
admiration of the facts, they pleased their fancy by regarding that
inner man as divine, and constructing a mystical universe. Hence we have
angels! A lovely illusion which Lambert would never abandon, cherishing
it even when the sword of his logic was cutting off their dazzling
wings.
"Heaven," he would say, "must, after all, be the survival of our
perfected faculties, and hell the void into which our unperfected
faculties are cast away."
But how, then, in the ages when the understanding had preserved the
religious and spiritualist impressions, which prevailed from the time
of Christ till that of Descartes, between faith and doubt, how could men
help accounting for the mysteries of our nature otherwise than by divine
interposition? Of whom but of God Himself could sages demand an account
of an invisible creature so actively and so reactively sensitive, gifted
with faculties so extensive, so improvable by use, and so powerful under
certain occult influences, that they could sometimes see it
annihilate, by some phenomenon of sight or movement, space in its two
manifestations--Time and Distance--of which the former is the space of
the intellect, the latter is physical space? Sometimes they found it
reconstructing the past, either by the power of retrospective vision, or
by the mystery of a palingenesis not unlike the power a man might have
of detecting in the form, integument, and embryo in a seed, the flowers
of the past, and the numberless variations of their color, scent, and
shape; and sometimes, again, it could be seen vaguely foreseeing
the future, either by its apprehension of final causes, or by some
phenomenon of physical presentiment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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